Our Fitness Blog

4 Myths Women Believe About Strength Training

Strength training is a great element to add to your fitness routine if you are wanting to lose weight and tone your body. However, many women believe preconceived notions about strength training that make them hesitant to add it to their fitness routine. These ideas about lifting weight have been around forever and just won't go away. So, here we will look at a few of the more common weight lifting myths floating around out there and bust them. Hopefully, we will be able to help you change your mind about adding that weight lifting routine to your daily workout.

I will become bulky. Most women can not gain muscle mass very quickly or easily because it requires a lot of testosterone to build muscle. Believe me, you will not start a weight lifting program and wake up the next day turned into the Hulk. In fact, strength training is the perfect way to rev up your metabolism and continue to burn more calories after your workout. You may notice that you are hungrier after you strength training routines, but that is to be expected because of the revved metabolism and the higher number of calories burnt. Therefore, you may need to watch what you are eating to ensure that you do not gain weight, but as a woman, you are highly unlikely to turn into a body builder just by adding a strength training routine to your usual workout.

Strength training can target and tone certain areas. It is impossible to dictate to your body which areas you to shed fat in first. Some of the lucky ones will be able to lose weight in their so called problem areas, but others may lose it everywhere except the place they were targeting. Unfortunately, we do not get to pick and choose which sections we would like to shape. It would be great if we could, but it is basically up to your body to decide where the fat is going to come off first. For example, most of us think that if we do a hundred crunches, we will have those perfect washboard abs we have always dreamed of, but as most of us find out after relentlessly doing a hundred crunches, this is just not true. The same holds true for strength training exercises.

It is too dangerous. Any exercise is dangerous if you do not know how to perform it. I mean these days trying to walk across the street can be dangerous, especially if you just blindly run across it. The main thing here is to seek out the proper ways to strength train. There are many things you can do to lower your risk of injury such as hiring a trainer, perfecting your form, seeking the help of professionals and knowing your limits. You do not want to jump into strength training without knowing anything about it. Just like, you do not want to run across the street without looking both ways and determining if you can move fast enough to avoid being hit by a car.

Strength training can transform fat into muscle. There is no way that you are turning fat into muscle. You can not turn a dog into a cat. They are two completely different things. It is just not possible. However, you can reduce your body fat and increase your muscles mass, which may make you believe that you turned fat into muscle. The same could also be said if you stop building muscle. Your muscle will not turn into fat, but you may increase your fat and lose some muscle mass. However, they did not transform into one another. The main thing to remember is that you want to strength train to decrease your body fat and increase your muscle mass because we would all like to be a little less jiggly and a lot firmer.

There are a lot of good reasons to add strength training to your fitness routine. It helps us achieve our weight loss goals faster, builds up our strength and endurance, boosts our confidence and makes us feel healthier. If you have steering clear of strength training because of these myths, then it may be time to revisit the idea of adding some sort of strength training routine to your daily workout.